Twitter was never the biggest social media site, but it’s status and influence was immeasurable. And then one day a person many call 'crazy', who also happens to be the richest man on the planet, bought it and started remaking it in his own image: hopelessly juvenile and susceptible to lies.
These things are not new on the site formally known as Twitter, now known as X, but there was at one time a willingness to take action, or at least a certain degree of shame that racism, misogyny, conspiracies and misinformation were something you could encounter on the platform without really trying. Now, this is the bread and butter of engaging on (sigh) X, and while you might call it the cost of free expression, it’s probably not going to be the only cost.
It was shocking but not terribly surprising earlier this week when the City of Cambridge announced that they would no longer be posting on X. Their city hall made the move because of “concerns about the platform’s reliability, accountability and direction.”
“This decision follows ongoing concerns about the platform’s viability as a trusted space for public communication as content found and promoted on X, includes racism and misinformation,” a media release read. “The City feels X no longer aligns with the values of inclusivity, respect, integrity, service and responsible communication.”
Cambridge said that they will continue to post on Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta who has been freezing out Canadian news for the last few years because the federal government believes that journalism shouldn’t just be grist for their content mill, and Linkedin, which is definitely a website that exists. They also say they’re looking at other options like BlueSky.
All this is fair, and Cambridge is hardly alone in this. The Upper Grand District School Board announced earlier this year that they were no longer going to post on X except in the case of emergencies, but they even removed that one caveat a few weeks later and said they would no longer post on X at all.
As Musk continues his full-blown assault on the American administrative state while being insulated from blame and responsibility due to his wealth and a political party’s fear of him using it against them, the pressure will continue to weigh on individuals, groups and companies: How long can you tacitly support a man who can throw up a Nazi salute with impunity?
This is a question that I’m not sure has an easy answer, and it’s one that I’m struggling with too.
For nearly a decade I’ve used Twitter/X to cover city council meetings, and it’s been fairly well-received. Not only does it let people follow the action as it happens, but you can re-visit it later in a way that’s more detailed than the official council minutes or any single article about that meeting (including mine). I’ve been moving some of that work to my BlueSky account, not just because of Musk’s fascistic tendencies, but because it’s a better, cleaner experiencing using it.
My own needs are unique from those a municipal government, but the goal is the same: sharing information. This is important because if you go to the City of Guelph website looking for a specific piece of newly posted information, you’re going to have a hard time, but if you go to Twitter and find the tweet and click on the link that takes you to the specific webpage you’re looking for, life is so much easier.
In the wake of the loss of the daily newspaper and other mass market local media, the most direct way to try and reach the most people at one time is social media. So with Cambridge pulling their X account, and receiving a lot of encouragement from the internet peanut gallery for the move, I have to ask all those people how they expect their city hall to spread the news now?
GuelphToday and CambridgeToday have filled the void. More so than the final version of the newspapers that preceded them on a pure volume of readers level.
But still, one of the biggest complaints I always hear is “I didn’t hear about that.” Meaning there’s some engagement, or master plan, or official plan amendment that the city is trying to get feedback on and so many people seem to know nothing about it.
This Spartacus moment of rejecting big American companies is good but are we so busy rejecting the Americans and their platforms that we don’t fully appreciate the difficulty in building our own?
And I have to say, based on my own enlightened self-interest, it’s really hard to convince people to invest in local news gathered infrastructure. People, both well-meaning and malicious, are more than happy to take the hard work of local journalists and just drop it on the same social media sites that some of them claim to revile. We deeply resent the prominence that these sites have in our lives and livelihood, but we can’t seem to quit them even when there’s an obvious alternative.
Now I’m hardly any different. I use social media to deliver and receive information for the very point that we’ve built our lives around them. The first part of solving any problem though is admitting that we have one, and for a long time we’ve had an information delivery problem. Unfortunately, things had to get this bad for enough of us to finally start to admit it.
We recently passed the ninth anniversary of the closure of the Guelph Mercury, and I have always remembered one particularly ignorant comment. Someone posted to one of the articles about the closure saying that it didn’t matter to them because they get their news from Facebook, but Facebook has never produced news about Guelph city hall, the Ontario government, or really any level of government. They never have, and still don’t.
We lived for a long-time without having these sites and apps in our lives, but the question isn’t whether we can go back to living without them, the question is do we even want to.